


Mexico

by sophinisba



Category: El Laberinto del Fauno | Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Abortion, Angst, Culture Shock, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, Mother-Son Relationship, POV Female Character, Post-Canon, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-01
Updated: 2010-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-06 22:51:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When you get to Mexico you can start over."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mexico

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a 2008 New Year's Resolution but for some reason it took me two years to finish, so now it's just a fic.

Juancito is getting too big to sit on her lap. He's also getting too curious about the bedtime stories that used to send him straight to sleep.

"Why didn't they put the bad man in jail?" he wants to know. Or, "And then what? What happened to the princess after that?"

"I'll tell you another time, _príncipe_," Mercedes says, smoothing her hand through his straight black hair. "Enough for tonight. Let me put you to sleep."

"I'm not a prince," he says, jutting out his jaw. "In Mexico we don't have princes, or princesses or kings and queens. We are the children of the Aztecs!"

She's been calling him her prince since he was born, and he's never rejected the endearment before. Somehow the rebuke sounds even harsher in the child's gentle singsong, as if, more than just educating her about Republicanism, he's taunting her with his ability to speak like the Mexicans do. Calling her backward, old, immigrant, exile. He's right, she thinks, Juancito with his parents barely buried in Aragon, like the Aztec rulers in the shallow waters of Tenochtitlán. For how can he be a prince if he doesn't think he's one of our people anymore? And why is Mercedes still waiting on a prince to rescue her?

"You know," she says, "I like to tell old stories, but we didn't want to have a king in Spain either."

"Why not?"

"Because we wanted to choose the government ourselves, like you do here in Mexico. And we wanted everyone to have enough food to eat, not just the rich."

"In Mexico we had a revolution, and we have elections. So how come not everyone has enough to eat?"

Mercedes takes off her glasses and presses her fingers to her forehead. If the boy were as tired as she is, if he had any notion of how tiring it is to carry a baby across a mountain range and an ocean, surely he would stop asking questions and would just lie down and go to sleep.

"Mamá?" Juancito asks, timidly, after a long while.

"Yes, hijo?"

"Will you tell me the story of Princess Moanna again?"

* * *

She hugs him in relief and complies at once. It's much easier to grant this request than to explain why people still starve in Mexico.

Mercedes had known hunger all her life, but nothing in her childhood prepared her for the deep hunger of the war. And even the war, when there was hunger and fear and cold but always also hope for a brighter future, even that could never prepare her for the dull despair that came after.

So many starved and ragged Spaniards and Catalans and Basques dragged themselves over the Pyrenees in 1939 that the French didn't know what to do with them, so they put them in camps. The Republicans had left the warzone for more barbed wire, and Mercedes would have given anything to be with them.

She had letters from her sweetheart, Juan Manuel, who'd fought in the siege of Barcelona. He wrote to her from France in March of that year, just to let her know he was alive. He wrote again in June to say he was joining the Foreign Legion along with a dozen other boys he'd met in the refugee camp. It was too late to fight for justice in Spain, but there was still work to do, fighting the Nazis in France, in the rest of Europe, maybe even in Africa.

For God's sake, Mercedes thought. How can you keep fighting when there are people who need you alive? They'll take you in Mexico. Why won't you go to Mexico?

México, México, the name started to sound like an incantation. It was a magical place to them in those days, when España and Aragón and even Francia were nothing but old empty playgrounds, littered with bullets and broken glass. When _Rusia_ stopped sounding like revolution and started sounding like prison. Mexico was possibility. It was ancient and brand new. Mexico was where you could start over. And if Juan Manuel hadn't gone and thrown his life away a second time, she could be with him in Mexico.

She tried writing to him. She worried about the censors, but she trusted they wouldn't make too much fuss for a refugee and a servant girl, that even if they read her secrets they wouldn't come after her. _Don't leave me here alone,_ she pleaded. _I cannot bring a child into the world if I know she'll have to grow up in a place like this. Go to Mexico and send for us._

She never knew if he read her letter or not. She waited until the last day Jacinta said the cantharides would work without killing her, and there was still no word from Juan Manuel. "Go on, child," said Jacinta. "When you get to Mexico you can start over. This isn't your last chance."

To Jacinta, Mexico just meant the place that Mercedes sometimes talked about. It sounded like heaven – the place you tell children about to help them accept how bad things are on earth.

The war was over, or so they said, but the war in Europe dragged on, and so did the one in the hills. Every year a few more of the boys in Pedro's band died of bullet wounds, infections, and cold. Every year a few more fled the village to join them. Apart from that, very little changed. There were no children in the house, and Mercedes thought less and less about her second chance. Juan Manuel must be dead. And who else would come to this place to rescue her? And how could she think of going off by herself, with her brother still starving in the woods?

Then Ofelia came.

* * *

"Mamá," says Juancito, "do you really believe those old stories you tell?"

She answers the same thing she said when Ofelia asked her about fairies. "There are lots of things I used to believe in that I don't believe anymore."

Strange to think she was already so jaded back then, when Ofelia was young and beautiful, curious and alive.

Juancito's curiosity is different, less deep but more insistent. "But Princess Moanna's story, you say it's just a fairy tale, you say it's just to make me fall asleep, but it's not, is it? In Spain you really do have princesses. Did you know her?"

"Now don't go getting ideas that you come from royalty, just because you were born in the Old World and your silly old mother calls you a prince! We were humble people there, just as we're humble people here."

Juancito narrows his eyes and turns away. "I want to go to sleep now," he says. It's just what she's been waiting to hear for hours. She'd never thought the words would cause her pain.

* * *

Mexico was not a magical place. It was hot and dry and infinitely strange. Mercedes felt lost in its square city streets as she never had in the rolling hills of Aragon or the circles of the Labyrinth.

She didn't go hungry anymore but the Mexicans' spices burned her mouth and the maize sat heavy in her stomach. She longed for her old kitchen, even though she knew it had never been her own. Her new kitchen and the flat she shared with Pedro and the baby were as small as the city was vast and confusing.

Mexico's children stared at her on the street and laughed out loud when she dared to speak. Mercedes, who had known the power in her own body whether she was gutting a pig or screaming her passion into Juan Manuel's mouth, saw herself through their eyes now – a frail lost refugee in a threadbare, oldworld shawl, cringing at the daily challenges of riding the tram, shopping in the market, cooking food that her child would eat.

Of course they told everyone that Juan was her son. Even before they reached the French border they'd decided on that. She and Pedro had even considered posing as a married couple, just to have less questions to answer, but Pedro recoiled the first time they tried telling the lie, so they told half-truths instead, a skill Mercedes had practiced over the years: Yes, they were brother and sister. Yes, Mercedes was the mother. No, the father hadn't survived.

In Mexico Pedro found work in a factory. Soon he spent more time there than he did in the flat, and when he got off work he'd join with the other exiled soldiers in the bars, weeping and singing songs about a new day dawning, beautiful as a woman dressed in purple, gold and red.

Some months after their arrival their upstairs neighbor (a Portuguese lady whom Mercedes had to stare at and listen to with all her concentration to understand the simplest speeches) helped her find a job at a textile factory.

Pedro spent his days in the flat next door, and a few years later he went off to school. Mercedes had never thought she'd miss the chaos of the French border, but now she missed those days when she had nothing to do but hold the child in her arms.

* * *

In the morning he goes to school, where every day he learns more about how to live in this new world without her. When they talk about Spain they talk about Conquest, a lust for gold, an inheritance of war. Spain is an angry father, a dictator come down from an old line of dead kings, but Mexico is their mother, their Virgin, María-Malintzin. There's no place in his world for a curious little girl or a woman whose true love is dead.

"What about my real mother?" he says when he comes home. "Who was she? I know she wasn't really a queen, but why do you talk about her as if she was?"

"I am your real mother, _hijo_. I carried you all the way across the mountains and across the ocean because I love you so. I couldn't stand to be without y –"

"I know that," says Juancito. "You've told me before. But my real mother, in Spain. Why won't you tell me about her?"

"But I have," she says, "if you'd only listen the way you used to."

She stops telling him bedtime stories, lets the spirits of this land whisper him into dreams of the future.

Mercedes lies in bed alone and hears the Faun's scornful laughter carried across mountains and oceans.

"You thought you could get out," he says, "but the truth is you're always here, with me, in the Labyrinth."

Mercedes hears the words that even he is too kind to say.

_The truth is you never grew up. You were never meant to be a mother._


End file.
